Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks: One CEO's Quest for Meaning and Authenticity

Description

August Turak is a successful entrepreneur, corporate executive, and award-winning author who attributes much of his success to living and working alongside the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey for seventeen years. Service and selflessness are at the heart of the 1,500-year-old monastic tradition's remarkable business success, an ancient though immensely relevant economic model that preserves what is positive and productive about capitalism while transcending its ethical limitations and internal contradictions. Combining vivid case studies from his thirty-year business career with intimate portraits of the monks at work, Turak shows in this volume how Trappist principles can be successfully applied to a variety of secular business settings and to our personal lives as well. He ultimately demonstrates that the monks and people like Warren Buffett are wildly successful not despite their high principles but because of them. Turak also introduces other "transformational organizations" that share these crucial monastic business strategies so critical for success. What a highly successful, centuries-old practice can teach the corporate world and how it can bring more meaning to one's career.